Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur

From its creation as a mail-order record company to the literal launch of Virgin Galactic, today Virgin is one of the premier ‘way-of-life’ brands in the world, trusted and enjoyed by many millions of people. In Business Stripped Bare, Sir Richard Branson shares the inside track on his life in business and reveals the incredible truth about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals.

Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons in Life and Business

Richard Branson is an iconic businessman. In Screw It, Let’s Do It, he shares the secrets of his success and the invaluable lessons he has learned over the course of his remarkable career. As the world struggles with the twin problems of global recession and climate change, Richard explains why it is up to big companies like Virgin to lead the way in finding a more holistic and environmentally friendly approach to business.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership

While building the Virgin Group over 40 years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership.

Start Something That Matters

What matters most to you? Should you focus on earning a living, pursuing your passions, or devoting yourself to the causes that inspire you? The surprising truth is that you don’t have to choose—and that you’ll find more success if you don’t. That’s the breakthrough message of the TOMS One for One movement. You don’t have to be rich to give back and you don’t have to retire to spend every day doing what you love. You can find profit, passion, and meaning all at once—right now.

How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

Using the greatest material from his popular Blog Maverick, Cuban has collected and updated his postings on business and life to provide a catalog of insider knowledge on what it takes to become a thriving entrepreneur. He tells his own rags-to-riches story of how he went from selling powdered milk and sleeping on friends' couches to owning his own company and becoming a multibillion-dollar success story.

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change

Adam Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just 16 years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling as a college student, he met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Braun asked the boy what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, "A pencil." This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organization Braun would leave a prestigious job at Bain & Company to start with just $25 at the age of 24.

Super Rich

Russell Simmons knows firsthand that wealth is rooted in much more than the stock market. True wealth has more to do with what's in your heart than what's in your wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons became one of America's shrewdest entrepreneurs, achieving a level of success that most investors only dream about. No matter how much material gain he accumulated, he never stopped lending a hand to those less fortunate.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation's most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms

As the creator of DanielleLaPorte.com - deemed "the best place online for kick-ass spirituality," Danielle LaPorte’s straight-talk life-and-livelihood sermons have inspired over one million people. Bold but empathetic, she reframes popular self-help and success concepts.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.

The Millionaire Booklet

The Millionaire Booklet was created for you to keep close to you until you become a millionaire. The eight steps Grant lays out are in a very simple-to-understand language that will allow you to get started today in creating the money you deserve. Let's face it, your parents didn't teach you how to get rich and the schools and colleges don't even talk about it. At a time when more and more people are slipping out of the middle class into poverty, more people are becoming rich.

Gas is 5 bucks says:"Grant is awesome - but don't bother with this one"

Do the Work

Could you be getting in your way of producing great work? Have you started a project but never finished? Would you like to do work that matters, but don't know where to start?The answer is Do the Work, a manifesto by best-selling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work. Do the Work is a weapon against Resistance - a tool that will help you take action and successfully ship projects out the door.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.

Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less

A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth - while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth.

Publisher's Summary

Richard Branson, one of the world's most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it's time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities, and the planet as he writes:

"People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records while sailing the Atlantic or flying in a jet stream in a balloon or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this audiobook isn't just about fun and adventure and exceeding one's wildest dreams. It's a different kind of business book. It's about revolution. The message is a simple one: business as usual isn't working. In fact, business as usual is wrecking this planet. Resources are being used up; the air, the sea, the land are all heavily polluted. The poor are getting poorer. Many are dying of starvation or because they can't afford a dollar a day for lifesaving medicine.

"But my message is not all doom and gloom. I will describe how I think business can help fix things and create a more prosperous world for everyone. I happen to believe in business because I believe that business is a force for good. By that I mean that doing good is good for business.

"Doing the right thing can be profitable. I will show how this works step by step in the following pages. It's the core message of this book. I often say, 'Have fun and the money will come.' I still believe that, but now I am saying, 'Do good, have fun and the money will come.'"

Richard Branson is a visionary with ideas that will work for the success of businesses in the 21st century. The face and practice of business is changing. Gathering forward-thinking business leaders into master minds and other groups is brilliant. It's not just about profits; it's about making a lasting change in the world.

What did you like best about this story?

It was wonderful to hear of of businesses that at first seemed impossible to get off the ground, but are incredibly successful now and changing the world. It's about the good of humanity and being able to make a profit.

Did Sean Pratt do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

Sean's voice is pleasant, but his pauses in text weren't well-timed. When I thought a sentence meant one thing it actually meant another when he finished the sentence. He paused a bit too long at commas and in series (e.g., when speaking a list, such as the series of things a business does), making it seem like they were periods instead of commas, or that a sentence ended when it really didn't. It interrupted the flow of thought. His differentiation of characters was satisfactory.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I didn't have an extreme reaction to this book but it is inspiring. I have the hard copy but didn't have time to finish it so I got the audiobook so I could listen while driving.

The overall message of the book is great (basically, stop going about business as usual and only caring about profit lines and start caring about people and the environment), but it didn't leave a lot or any advice on how to achieve it for the average person.

Branson gives a lot of examples of projects and companies that have "screwed business as usual" and came out on top. In a way, this book is a big pat on the back since the gist is pretty much summed up within the first 20 minutes, but it is nice to hear of success stories too. I feel a little at a loss about what my personal takeaway should be since I'm not a CEO, buts it's nice to hear there are companies out there not completely focused on the bottom line.